Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Pesky DNS lock-outs

Today I get the supreme pleasure of working out of our Chino Valley Branch office. This is nice because it is only a few short gas-guzzling miles from home.

It is also nice because it is quiet out here, and my phone isn't ringing much. Maybe people think I am dead?

One downside to working out here though, is that I don't have my very own dedicated internet connection. So now I have to go through all the same web-blockers and DNS blocker as the other employees here. The web-blockers isn't such a big deal, because hey! I'm the IT guy and I have the password to that.

The OpenDNS system though, is a bit more of a pain in the butt. I don't want to turn it off, since I still want the other employees to be blocked, but I also want access to my stuff without interruption.

The Answer? Well after 20 minutes of searching around it turns out to be totally easy. See the way that the OpenDNS system works is this:

1. When my computer turns on and asks for an address from the server it is provided with that address as well as a DNS Server address, which is an OpenDNS server.

2. Now every time I type in an address (e.g. www.tombocheck.blogspot.com) my request is re-directed through OpenDNS, where they check to see if it matches any of their qualifications for rejected sites.

3. That particular site is categorized as 'Blogs' and so the nice OpenDNS people re-route me to a page tell me that I am blocked.

So the way to get around all this is just to find a Public DNS server, and manually give my computer that address.

We used to have a (nearly) completely open internet for our employees. But kids will be kids, and many were abusing the privilege. So they went from nearly wide-open to cinched down to work-related-only now.

So no blogs, no games, no news sites, no webmail sites. A whole lot of nada. And I'm the nazi that has to keep on top of them now, which totally sucks.